Published, in Brief. The New York Post today published a much-abbreviated version of a letter I sent them three days ago. An amplified version of that letter appears as the May 13th entry to this blog.
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I didn't know the Post had published anything - because I don't buy the Post and when I go to the online version it is generally only to check out the columnists and/or editorials - until I got a phone call from a woman who agreed with my main point, which is that we should not pretend that the violence we commit is somehow qualitatively different from the violence our "enemies" commit.
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She asked if I felt the same about the violence in World War II against Germany and Italy, to which I of course answered yes. WWII was "total war", war against civilians in which cities were mercilessly destroyed while inhabited. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were killed in such indiscriminate bombing of targets that had little or no military significance. The most notorious example is the British-American raids upon Dresden near the end of the war, in which a beautiful medieval city was destroyed by a firestorm that killed tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands a mere three months before Germany surrendered. A British apologist ("historian") recently wrote a book that claims that 'only' 25,000 to 40,000 people, many of them refugees from the Russian invasion heading their way, died in that firestorm. Other historians claim much larger numbers, even more than the combined death toll from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truth will never be known nor universally accepted, but killing even "only" 25,000 or 40,000 civilians is hardly a trivial matter no one should get upset about. Compare 9/11: fewer than 3,000 people were killed in the attack upon the World Trade Center, but we thought that was monstrous.
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In any case, the Post published one letter that I know of. They didn't call first to verify that I wrote that letter. So now I must wonder how many other letters of the many I send them they have published.
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Years ago, I used to have letters published by the Post fairly often. One led off the department, with a two-column headline. One was illustrated! One (the illustrated one?) prompted a Chinese-language newspaper in New York to ask permission to publish a Chinese version in their own paper (to which request I of course acceded).
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But then I stopped writing to the Post frequently, and no longer saw the print version of the paper, because I no longer worked somewhere that it was lying around. I'm certainly not going to buy the New York Post!
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The paper got much better in terms of seriousness and writing quality after 'Uncle Rupie' (Rupert Murdoch, as I call him) returned to control. But its editorial stance! Horrible and inhuman.
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So when I discovered that the Post accepts emailed letters, I signed up for its newsletter that hilites the opinion columns of the day, which arrives Monday thru Friday, even tho the Post publishes seven days a week. I don't know why. There's usually something in the Post to infuriate me every day. But the Post doesn't publish my letters every day. I don't know why. Thus this blog.
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If the Post's managing editor were really smart, he'd hire me as a columnist, to balance the unending drone of Radical Right drivel with enlightened commentary, and thus win more liberal readers and improve the paper's bottom line. The Post isn't that smart.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:08 PM